figure but at what point in his life do people stop trusting him with their money? thank you for joining us. >> two days later and republicans are still dazed and confused. >> back to business and back on the brink. >> president obama is dealing with the looming fiscal cliff. >> that could send the country into a recession. >> that is the issue. >> people are sick of the gridlock. >> we are not as divided as our politics suggest. >> we can seize the feature together. >> you have speaker boehner. >> let's do the right thing together for our country. >> you have to do this.

>> i have never been more hopeful about our future. >> i know a lot of you are already on my side. >> i have two strong words for you. >> fiscal cliff. >> come on. >> oh, okay. all right. >> the fiscal cliff clock ticks on. >> it was the most expensive political election in history. >> a big, fat, zero. >> some soul searching about the feature future of the party. >> you think i do this night after night for your amusement? >> how do you repay me? >> four more years of hope and change. >> today republican ares battled with republicaned over why they lost an election they were sure

they were supposed to win. we know they will never figure it out. today was the president's first full day at the white house. >> in the coming weeks and months i am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together reducing our deficit reforming our tax code fixing our immigration system and freeing ourselves from foreign oil we have more work to do. >> this morning the president's senior campaign strategist told the morning joe crew this. >> on this issue of particularly the fiscal cliff, presidents always say i had a mandate, that is a foolish word and it is generally untrue. but the president did campaign

all over this country he talked about it in debates and speeches on the need for balance deficit reduction that included new revenues and he was re-elected in a significant way. >>today republican house speaker said this. >> raising tax rates is unacceptable and it couldn't pass the house. i laid out a reasonable way forward to avoid the fiscal cliff. that is putting in, increased revenues on the table and through reforming our tax code. it is time for the house to lay this out. >> you h talk about it even if you believe it is the wrong approach. >> of course we will talk about it. >> talk about it. that is enough for rush limbaugh to think that john boehner is a traitor to a noble cause.

>> the night of the election, we are the fire wall. we are the last stand. there would be no tax increases that is out the window now. they are making a huge error if they think that demography did them in. they didn't get their base out. this is not insignificant. >> i felt there wasn't enough of you in our opening video. that is why i need you here as a guest tonight. >> i will hog the camera for a long as you like. >> the camera loves you. that is why you are in there every night. >> rush is in a panic. he feels there is going to be more bite on his $50 million he takes home every year. >> this fiscal cliff thing, he can talk all he wants, but those rates go up if they do nothing.

>> they don't have many cards to play. poor john boehner who has the worst job is forced to do this fan dance. the day after the election is intimate that is they can come to the table and strike a bargain but has to shuffle back and keep him in the house and whipped by the gop which is to say say, chastised that this may be tax increased i am of the mibd that there is a big conversation as to where they go from here. and i have a hope that they understand if they are going to survive past 2016 they need to make serious changes not just in terms of having a brown person on stage but really a cultural shift within the party and that includes being able to bargain

and putting a plan on the table. >> it couldn't have gotten worse in january there will be more democratic members of the house of representatives. i don't see any reason for the president and the democrats not to wait until january op n doing anything on this. i'm with you 1,000 percent on the off the cliff strategy. we have to get chris an off the cliff button >> here are two things that i would say. it is very interesting. fiscal cliff was a term coined by ben bernanke. and he was doing it to try to kick congress's butt to do something stimulative. but what has happened is if people think about it as a cliff, they don't understand that you can go off it.

it is not just a slope. it is a little driveway, i think the rhetoric that has come out around it is bad for the negotiating position for the president because it makes seeming go off the cliff worse than what it is. >> down the slope a little bit. what will happen is if they do it on january 1st, congress will go into action in the first week of january and anything they legislate can be rote tro etro active to that day so no one ends up paying more taxes anyway. the fiscal reality of going off the curve, stepping off the curb. >> new buttons. i think he learned something during the tax hike you want to

get the republican ares to the table. you do not go play golf with them and take them to camp david, you take to the road and say all right this is what the gop is going to do. and that is greater than anything else. we know what the public is thinking. 13 percent are in favor of an increase of all of the tax brackets. increase has support of 37%. 60% say go ahead and pull them up on the income earnings at the top. if this election was about anything. there was one thing that was clear that was at stake in this election it was the top rates for individuals. even if you just watch a little of the debate.

there is no question that was probably the central policy issue that was debated and one side one and one side lost. no one can pretend there is a clear democratic judgement on that policy. the thing about single voters, reproductive vites s rights is your single issue and you are a republican woman in new jersey and you are going to vote for the president on this. you are accepting that package with that vote. you are saying rights are important enough to me that i will take the risk of my taxes going up. this was a weird election in so far as we knew there was going to be a big budget conversation. george w. bush doesn't mention security on the campaign trail.

that is not what is going on here. this is all we talked about. >> well, he did have a sentence about it in his convention speech. you know, obama's pollster argues, i happen to have it here. >> do you you, quote it, i will tell you if you are right. he said this election was not just about democratics. >> he said it was a triumph of vision. >> while americans said mitt romney had a technical understanding of the economy, this was about trusting someone. someone who would fight for a better economic future for your children and that is a huge take away. that is buying into the vision of obama. he said that 52% agreed with president obama's views and 44% agreed with romney's views.

>> you can't sell people nothing. you may win over latinos and women and latin americans. you can't say they are brown and they are brown >> this is a key point. i think the discussion has gotten reductive. people who are latino or asian think about policy and whether they want their taxes to go up or down. there is no question there was ideal logical ratification that happened in this election. >> what i love about this, they are never going to turn to policy and say what about pro-choice? >> maybe we should open up to that. >> it is amazing that rush is saying that less than 48 hours after what is termed a whomping in this race. they cannot take a few days to think about where they want to go.

>> rush never ceases to amaze, alex wagner at 12:00 noon. and chris haze saturday and sunday morning at 8:00 am. >> thank you for joining me tonight. >> coming up karl rove saying that democrats expressed the vote. >> david corn and rob beard r reich will join me on that one. how team obama actually dit. and a last word exclusive the woman responsible for fired up and ready to go. i don't want you to watch unless you have been elected to the senate. i want to have words with newly elected senators secrets that they need to know right now. my doctor told me calcium

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what new senators have to know about their new jobs and up next karl rove's excuse for massive failures of his super pack spending democrats expressed the vote. humans -- even when we cross our t's and dot our i's, we still run into problems. namely, other humans. which is why, at liberty mutual insurance, auto policies come with new car replacement and accident forgiveness if you qualify. see what else comes standard at libertymutual.com. liberty mutual insurance. responsibility.

what's your policy? cross roads which you helped found spent 3 $325 million and we have ended up with the same president and the same majority in the senate and in the house. was it worth it? >> yes. if groups like crossroads were not active this race would have been over a long time ago.

>> that was karl rove an hour after the president was re-elected. >> as we sit here today the president is re-elected and there are more democrats in the house and if i were one of those billionaires funding crossroads and those organizations i would want to talk to someone and ask where my refund is because they didn't get much for their money. >> joining me now, robert reich and professor at the university of california.

$325 million wasted. there is actually nothing on the scoreboard to show for it. karl rove says no, no it was a good thing. >> five minutes of revenue at the cacasinos. it is a waste. and the billionaires. but what i think they did do, they tilted the playing field and made it harder for barack obama and democrats like brown and elsewhere where they flooded with money. can you imagine what the final results might have been without that money if they didn't have to worry about an extra $20 million he would have had a greater win in ohio? i think the president might have picked up an extra point or two

with the negative adds like groups like karl rove ran. barack obama was able to raise a lot of money. mitt romney couldn't do that. so the playing field should have been this way but that money go it closer to even. so they came through. >> the democrats won, they won more seats in the senate and in the house. does it matter how much their winning percentage was? >> of course it does matter. it is going to be difficult for president obama to do much in his second term. they are going to hold pack in the house. he doesn't have a figure buster proof majority in the senate. of course it does matter.

had their not been this money in the races he might have had a larger majority. the investors, they are not really donors. all of the other super packs, the republican super packs and the so calls organizations they are not going to go away. their investments were very, very small. if they had one big, their investments would have paid 500 to 1,000 times in terms of tax breaks that they would have got. they are going to come back with larger amounts of money that they are going to invest in these things. don't give up the need for finance reform. this has just begun. >> one pint oint here is that the critics of the critics and people that wrote the opinion said that money doesn't

determine things and they are going to use this election to justify things. it didn't have a big impact right? so we are going to let it keep going and what the secretary said is right. but it is going to be harder now for people to make the case. next time around. the venting billionaires may be a show me perspective and the money may come in, but later in the cycle after the republicans have proven that they have done a better job with it. don't forget, the coke brothers and others have poured a lot of money into all sorts of initiative drives. the evil that this big money has done is still not clear on the radar screen. >> there has been a lot of talk

about republicans trying to suppress the vote trying to create these laws and suppress the vote. soef karl rove says ho sup they suppressed the vote. they did that by advertising against mitt romney and making people not want to vote for them. >> bain capitol, american cross roads with an add in july. it is better to have the candidates to have the most effective response to respond to the charge and flip the argument to the narrative. these things hurt deeply.

reality sometimes bites. but can i tell you it wasn't the obama campaign that began the attacks. they were calling him a vulture in the early part of this year. when the president picked up on it and people started reporting on the outsource ing, they kept ducking the issue. we started with the 47% tape. it ratified with his own words and it took them two week to say that i was wrong. car rove can justify this anyway that he likes but it was part of the campaign and mitt romney screwed it up. >> donor is not going to have a romney chosen attorney general to make sure that he is not too curious about how he does business. thank you both for joining me

tonight. kurming ing coming up. how the one thing every newly elected senator needs to know right now is going to be in tonight's rewrite. or that printing in color had to cost a fortune. nobody said an all-in-one had to be bulky.

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>> hi, i thought obama would be buried in a landslide instead i've been in a bit of a mudslide on my face.

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[ applause ] all right. we got to line up some folks. we got to round up some votes. >> all right. >> and the spotlight tonight how the race was won. on election day team obama had more than 109,000 people canvassing and knocking on doors. more than 200,000 people working the phones including for a short time the president himself. on election day, president obama won 303 electoral votes. florida is still outstanding but the president is leading mitt romney there and if that lead holds team obama will have one

all but two of the battleground states that went for bush in 2002 and team obama in 2008. team romney was shellshocked. we wept into the evening confident we had a good path to victory. i don't think there was one person who saw this coming. romney was shellshocked. those people just don't watch enough msnbc and have never heard of nate silver. team obama was not shocked by tuesday's result. campaign managers who won a bear hug from the president for his efforts said it came down to a laser focus on the battleground states.

3.7% compared to 20085.3 showing our advantage in the battleground states. how did the campaign manage to keep better margins in the battleground states? >> we got the coop on november 4th on the condition that time not use names and public anything until after election day. in the past month said one official the team had polling data from about 29,000 people in ohio alone. a whopping samp that composed nearly half of one percent of voters there allowing for deep dives into the group. this was a huge advantage when the polls started to slip after the first debate. they could check to see which voters were changing sides and which were not.

joining me now. steve, campaigning shall never be the same. i'm going to say 1,800 different e-mails from the obama campaign, i think i stopped falling for that trig early on. i shutter. this worked. this is going to be something that anybody running for office anywhere is going to try to replicate in the years ahead. karen, if you do a big poll in a state like iowa. you will have a sample of 1400 people. here is the obama team with 29,000 people. a sample of 29,000 telling them how they are reacting to different events in the course of the campaign. including debate reaction >> not that long after the 2004, 2005 campaign a lot of what both sides were looking at is how do

you import some of those tactics. this is like commercial data. this is like the same kind of thing that advertisers do. we are going to have more than ever before. but it is understanding those lists and who your voters are and where they are and what they care about. what issue is it going to take to persuade them and hold them. by knowing that 29,000 they were able to figure out where those shifts were happening and how do we stop it. it is a way to campaign and it starts a year in advance because you start with a larger swath of data and you can then build up the profiles on each of those individuals.

>> the wonderful piece of information that we learned in politico where jim said the signature moment of the campaign came when he ran into a middle-aged woman during a visit to a columbus, ohio field office. i know everyone in my neighborhood the ones that will vote and don't and what it takes to get them. she added they just shipped in a romney staffer a couple of weeks ago. how do you think is going to win around here? steve, that is the story. yes, and a lot of this you have that quote saying that we didn't see this coming. there was an assumption saying that was showing up in the polls. the republicans were saying what they didn't have was the infrastructure in place to bring

that into a reality. part of it is they were bogged down in a primary. and part of it too was that is the nature of relying on the religious groups. and they hoped and sort of out sourced the gotv. >> i'm actually surprised steve, when governor dean became chairman in 2005, karl rove he used this methodology don't you remember the 72 hour strategy, we developed the under pinnings that became what t obama campaign did and one of the things that is so important about the quote that the woman made, to this day the most effective way to get a vote is a person to person contact. the woman new who needed to

contact that person in order to sway their vote. whether it was a neighbor a veteran. or a nurse or teacher. so again this personalized contact with voters on the issues that they care about. knowing where they are and who they are. at the end of the day going back to the old fashioned thing which is talking to people. and somehow the republicans forgot all of that. if i have people putting up yard signs, that is not true in modern campaigned anymore. an obama volunteer has to give them a reason to vote at the same time. karen finny, thank you both very much forgin joining me tonight. coming up. the rest of the senators elect need to listen to the one piece

of advice i have for them. they need to know the trick of get ago long with their senate colleagues and the trick to getting re-elected. that is coming up and it is just for senators elect. no one else should watch this. that is coming up. oh no, not a migraine now. try this... bayer? this isn't just a headache. trust me, this is new bayer migraine. [ male announcer ] it's the power of aspirin plus more in a triple action formula to relieve your tough migraines. new bayer migraine formula. who have used androgel 1%, there's big news. presenting androgel 1.62%.

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a model year newer. learn about it at libertymutual.com. liberty mutual insurance. responsibility -- what's your policy? if you are not a senator elect then you don't have to listen to what i have to say. i don't want you to. i need to talk to the newly elected senators about how they talk to the media. why don't you grab a snack or walk the dog or something while we have this little chat. okay, senators elect. and i so especially mean you, elizabeth warren you have to rewrite your rules about how you handle the political media and rule number one is no national

media none. that is right. i'm telling you not to do my show or any other national tv show. the coverage you get from or local tv stations is much more important to your re-election campaign which by the way, starts now. you are being invited on national shows now but your local media will get jealous quickly when they see you turning down a local tv interview and your voters will quickly notice that you enjoy the national spotlight more than tending to their local concerns. the current master of this rule is senator al franken who is in his 4th year in the seb at nate and he has not volunteered one

word to the national media. he has not given a single quote to the "new york times." he has been begged to come on to the national news show and he remains the hardest get in washington. but senator franken is always available to local minnesota media and he will surely pick up more editorial endorsements in minnesota for his first campaign and is also highly respected by his colleagues on both sides of the aisle because he does not fight for his place for the national media spotlight. he is known for a hard-working committee member. that is right. the only stand-up comedian is regarded as a serious man of the

senate and minnesota voters now know that al franken did not did that so that he could get on tv more. and i have no doubt that they are going to reward him for that. when he runs for re-election. al franken was laboring under a rare burden when he became a freshman senator. he was more famous than almost every senator there. imagine how much better he was able to get along with his colleagues when they realized he was never going to take their seat on "meet the press" or any show they wanted to be on. by the time i privately advised senator franken, the special

burden on freshman senators who are already famous has been handled well by most of them. danielle patrick monahan had been on the cover of new york. he had experience to know that his new colleagues feared he would steal their national media spot spotlights. he made press conferences with local new york media a weekly ritual long before becoming a regular on "meet the press." in the seven years that i worked for him in the middle of his career i saw him turn down many national media wre requests than he actually accepted. big bradley became a united

states senator from new jersey and quickly showed his colleagued that he was there to work not bask in the media lime light. when hillary clinton took his seat she too followed the moin ahan rule and payed more attention to local media and was rewarded for that in her easy re-election victory are. so senator election elizabeth warren. you don't just have the burden of being a freshman senator. you are more famous than most of your colleagues on day one and they are not exactly cool with that. you don't need the media more and you don't need to do media appearances to stay famous. you are going to be on the short

list for the nomination next time around even if you follow the rule and do no national media. but remember how scott brown followed the theme that you weren't one of us. one of us born and bred massachusetts people. the way to bower ury that forever is to spend your weekends is springfield in lowell and worcester and have lunch as a grill instead of a greenroom tv stud studio. now, if you are going to do national tv i strongly urge you to do it with someone who understands your constituents and is related to lun hundreds of them and someone like rachel.

even though i have given you this advice. don't think for a minute that i won't try to ambush you with a camera like i did with the master. >> sorry to ambush you. thank you for doing your first national interview with us. >> as long as it is with the minnesota delegation i'm proutd to be here. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. >> lawrence right? my doctor told me calcium

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where did they go?

>> i'm edith childs from greenville south carolina and i'm the one that got barack obama fired up. >> everyone is sayed fired up and ready to go. >> fired up ready to go. >> it shows you what one voice can do. >> president obama wanted edith childs at his final appearance as a candidate. >> we knew we were coming back to des moines for the last campaign rally i will ever do for me and so, you know we were getting kind of sentimental and we called up edith childs and we said why don't you come on up. [ cheers and applause ] >> listen to this. we said why don't you come on up and we'll fly you up from south carolina and you can do this chant one more time.

for all good times sake. it is like getting the band back together again. and you know what she said? she said, i'd love to see you, but, i think we can still win north carolina so same taking a crew into north carolina to knowledge on knock on doors on election day i don't have time i have to knock on some doors. [ cheers and applause ] i have to turn out the vote. [ cheers and applause ] >> i'm still fired up, but i got work to do. [ cheers and applause ] . >> we're happy to say that with her election work done edith childs said yes to us and joins us now. it was quite a story the president told the other night about inviting you along and you wanted to stay out there

knocking on those doors for him. i have never heard anything like it. it is amazing. >> well, um, you have to do what you have to do some times. >> and you remember that time when president obama first heard you talk about that phrase of yours he credits you with fired up and ready to go. >> yes. >> he told that story the other night in this final special. let'stice listen to how he described what you taught him. >> i hear this voice cry out behind me. fired up. and i'm startled and i don't know what's going on. but everybody in the room this is a small room. there is a small woman like 60 years old. looks like she came from church. she is grinning looking happy.

for the next few minutes she keeps saying fired up. and everybody says fired up ready to go. and everybody says ready to go and i'm thinking this woman is showing me up. this is my meeting i'm run forg president. and she is dominating the room. here is the thing. after a few minutes, i'm feeling kind of fired up. >> you got him fired up and ready to go and fired up and ready to go for another campaign also. did you expect in that meeting that night where you taught him that chant that it would go this far? >> no, i had no idea. that those five little words would have gone as far as they have gone. but it is an honor.

>> inspired not just that candidate but he used them to inspire his supporters throughout these campaigns. what happens for you when you hear him using that phrase? >> well, i just kind of sit back and smile and think about how awesome it is that five little words can mean so much to the nation. >> and where were you when you discovered on tuesday night that the president had been re-elected? well, i was home. sitting ip front of my tv. >> and this was something you had worked on now for five years counting both campaigned knowing that you created the chant that led both of those campaigns you have to feel a sense of

accomplishment here don't you? >> yes, it is quite an accomplishment. but again, sometimes you have to do what you have to do. and that was something that i wanted to do. and really felt good about it and the president felt good about it and i'm happy about it now. >> edith. the last word that we have to hear from you tonight is of course your signature phrase we have to hear it before we go. >> okay that would be fine. are you ready? >> we're ready. >> okay. fired up. ready to go. fired up ready to go. fired up. ready to go. fired up ready to go. fired up. ready to go.